Peyton' place

A decade ago the name Oliver Peyton was synonymous with partying, indulgence and excess. Every night, the bright young things of London fought to get into his Atlantic Bar & Grill. But then everything began to change, as Lynn Barber discovers when she meets the newly sober restaurateur

Party animals who remember Oliver Peyton in the Nineties are shocked - 'What do you mean, he's stopped drinking? Completely? What happened? Does he still talk?' Well yes he's stopped drinking completely and yes, he still talks but perhaps not so remorselessly as in his drinking days. Nevertheless the term 'babbling brook' springs to mind. I met him at his latest restaurant, the Admiralty in Somerset House, and even before we'd ordered (ravioli of snails, veal, chocolate pudding - delicious) he was telling me his views on fatherhood (great), sobriety (great), British catering colleges (dire), Turin (underestimated), Costa Rica (must go), Michelin (outmoded), vegetarians (tiresome) and the fact that there is no such thing as a vegetarian risotto. This was before we got onto the recession and the horrors of Manchester. Since the talking is all in a lilting Irish accent and seems to skip aimlessly from subject to subject, it is quite hard to follow, let alone get a word in edgeways, but I got the hang of it eventually.

It is very easy to under-estimate Oliver Peyton. He looks boyish, despite being 40; he is rake-thin, spiky-haired, casually dressed in jeans and velvet jacket. His life seems to be a complete doddle. He has homes in Bayswater and Cornwall and a great art collection. His office is half an hour's walk across Hyde Park, and his managing director is his sister, Siobhan. For entertaining, he has the pick of his own restaurants - Mash, Isola, Admiralty - or the Atlantic when he's in party mood. If those pall, he can visit other restaurants on the grounds of 'research'. He works hard during the week but not at all at weekends. Saturdays are for browsing in antique markets, Sundays for throwing big picnic parties in his garden square. He travels constantly - this year he has been to the Turks and Caicos islands, and will be going to Rome for Easter, Japan for the World Cup, Venezuela and Panama for Christmas, with frequent short breaks in Cornwall and Paris. People sometimes ask if I envy the people I interview and 99 times out of 100 I can answer, truthfully, no. But with Oliver Peyton, hmm...

Perhaps it was being under-estimated that drove him to come from nowhere - some bog in County Mayo - and conquer London at bewildering speed. When he opened the Atlantic Bar and Grill in 1994, there were still plenty of people in the industry who had never heard of him. He seemed to arrive without trace. In fact he'd been beavering away, building up capital, ever since he came to England as a student at the start of the Eighties. His first venture was a nightclub in Brighton called the Can, then one in London called Raw. 'You can make a lot of money in nightclubs,' he explains, 'but I only ever saw them as a means to an end.' The night he closed Raw he remembers taking £70,000 in cash back to his friend's flat in Willesden and gloating: 'Look at this! Some people don't earn this in their entire lives!'

He also developed a lucrative sideline importing Japanese beers - Kirin, Sapporo - and Absolut vodka. But going round selling his designer booze made him think what crap most English bars and restaurants were. You couldn't get a drink after 11 o'clock, and half the barmen didn't know the difference between 40-degree proof vodka (which freezes) and 37-proof (which doesn't). The idea of the Atlantic started bubbling in his head. As for restaurants, 'I got really fed up with that British pomposity, and not getting proper service unless you were dressed in a particular way. Restaurants should be classless places, where people who are earning money can have a good time - it's quite difficult to have a good time in England, especially in the winter'. He particularly remembers a Saturday lunch at Bibendum where one of his party wanted ice-cream as a starter and the waiter said it wasn't allowed. So then they all ordered ice-cream as a starter. 'Rules! I can't stand all that, because it's like the tail wagging the dog. I don't believe that any chef is greater than the customers.'

His constant mantra is 'restaurants should be about having fun'. He is not a cook but an impresario of pleasure - Matthew Fort calls him the Phineas T. Barnum of restaurateurs. He creates a great room, a great atmosphere, and leaves the customers to enjoy themselves, not worship at some culinary shrine. There are no rules against smoking, and customers can order off-menu if they must; the only thing that makes him twitchy is people wanting their meat well-done. 'But if they ask for it we do it - I don't want people to leave our restaurants unhappy.'

His first restaurant was Coast in London's Albermarle Street and then Mash - one in London and one in Manchester - then the Atlantic Bar & Grill, his most ambitious and spectacular achievement, followed by his two 'grown-up' restaurants, Isola in Knightsbridge and the Admiralty, in Somerset House. He also runs the catering for Somerset House, which means organising parties for the Prince's Trust and endless heritage groups - he has had to learn lesson one of blue-rinse catering which is never to serve multigrain bread to people who might wear dentures.

Anyway he is now definitely mature and it's all happened in the last couple of years - he became a husband, father and teetotaller, just before he turned 40. He used to be a BIG drinker - he used to spend £10,000 a year laying down wines for his personal cellar. But on 10 December 1999 he stopped completely. His wife Charlotte Polizzi (Lord Forte's granddaughter, Olga Polizzi's daughter, Rocco Forte's niece) told him 'Look, sort this out'. They both wanted a child and it wasn't going to happen while he was drinking. Virtue was duly rewarded with the birth of their son, Finn, last summer.

'My life has changed so much since then. I'm in a business where people expect you to talk [not necessarily all the time, Oliver!] and I think I suffered from low self-esteem. I always felt I couldn't cope with people, I had to have a drink. You know, I'm a happy person but all of a sudden you wake up to realise you've got quite a big business, employing 600 or 700 people, and it's quite frightening. And what I see now is that a lot of people live their lives just on the right side of alcoholism, but if you work in a restaurant and you start at six in the morning and you go home at 12 and you do that five nights a week, even if you drink moderately, you drink a lot. Plus all of my friends are fairly serious drinkers - I don't come from the school that says "I'll have one glass of wine", it's "Do you have it by the magnum?".'

He still smokes - though he says he's trying to cut down to one pack a day. Did he used to take drugs, as well? 'No not really. Well I mean of course you take drugs, but I don't think ever seriously. My life is more about general excess.' What happened to all the wine he laid down? 'I think my wife and friends are getting through it! I don't buy wine now, but I like being around people who drink, I like having a good time. You know the really weird thing about not drinking is, after a while you just don't notice. And I'm a lot happier now. The problem for me was I was getting very disillusioned with the restaurant business, I'd started thinking, "I can't keep doing this, I can't keep on". You start to hate even being in a restaurant - you think "Oh I'm not going there". But not now.

He says the worst time was about three years ago, when he had all these backers driving him on, telling him 'You've got to grow the company, you've got to be the biggest' and he got caught up in all that. And then there was Manchester - he still shudders at the name - which was one long nightmare. He set up a Mash there in 1996 and chose to locate it in the gay area. 'But then it went downhill very quickly. There were guns, drug barons, organised thuggery. And the Hacienda closed so all those drug dealers needed somewhere to sell their drugs and they descended on us. By the time I sold it a year and a half ago, we had bullet holes in the ceiling. We had a three metre wide Sam Taylor Wood picture stolen - I mean, three metres! - luckily I know Sam and she made another one. But the very last straw was we had 25 grand nicked out of the till - it was obviously an inside job but the police said they couldn't find who did it. I think we got the short straw.'

So he sold Manchester, and bought out all but one of his backers, and recently sold Coast, his first restaurant, and changed half of Isola into a bar, in order to hunker down for the recession. Survival, not expansion, is the name of the game now and all his fancy plans for a City club called the Lothbury have been put on hold. One good effect of the recession was to sink the Titanic - the restaurant Marco Pierre White launched right above the Atlantic, much to Peyton's fury - but now the Atlantic faces another threat. Westminster Council attempted to rescind its 3am licence and restrict it to 1am. Peyton for once loses his normal bonhomie when talking about it: 'Last year, we had September 11 and we had foot and mouth' - a quarter of the Atlantic's customers used to be tourists - 'and then we had Westminster Council trying to take my licence away! The Atlantic was Time magazine's Best Bar in Europe last year. And in eight years we've never had one complaint against us, not one.'

If the recession continues, might he sell? 'Oh I couldn't sell the Atlantic! I don't think we'll have to sell anything.' He says he is better placed than many restaurant owners because his company is managed by his three sisters so he doesn't have to worry about internal management feuds. (The company is called Gruppo - Italian for group - and when I said it sounded vaguely sinister, he nodded, 'That was the idea!'.)

He says the aim at present is just to stay in the business. 'I think restaurants this year are going to go through tough times. Unless you're really focused then you're going to struggle. I don't want to put any pressure on myself now - I want to enjoy myself. I don't have this burning desire to open two new restaurants tomorrow. I also don't care what people think. I used to be very concerned about what people thought of me - "look how great I am" - I think it was just a fear of failure. I don't feel that any more. Now, if I do things, I do them because I want to do them. I think I was a bit MAD before, to be honest with you - was more interested in what was coming next rather than what I'd got. Whereas now my focus is more about running what I've got, and making sure that it's as good as I can do.

'I love restaurants and I just want to get back to loving them - it's just keeping things more in perspective. All I'm interested in doing is staying in the business - and of course I also want to secure my family's future - but it's always the balance about how you go along. And when you have a baby, everything changes again. Everything you thought you knew goes out the window because all of a sudden you have to think about how you want to live for the rest of your life. Because the thing about life is - you can wake up and you're dead, do you know what I mean?' Yes, Oliver - enough talking now.